The Ghosts of Movies Past

An all-start list of seasonal films

The last thing we need is another ho-hum
list of holiday movie standbys. With that in mind, let’s instead shine a
light on a batch of seasonal movies that rarely get notice as such
and/or take on the subject at hand in a far different, often less overt
manner. Bourbon-laced eggnog is optional but highly recommended when
viewing the following list, which features a healthy dose of dark comedy
and familial messiness.

The Apartment
(1960): Billy Wilder’s enduring satire of office politics — a lowly
insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) makes extra money by lending his New York
City apartment to various philandering colleagues and bosses — is also
about how loneliness can be most acute during the holiday season. For
those who’ve yet to experience The Apartment, we’ll not reveal Lemmon’s Christmas Eve surprise, which is delivered via a moving, never-better Shirley MacLaine.

Bad Santa
(2003): Billy Bob Thornton plays an alcoholic, foul-mouthed,
deliciously cynical shopping mall Santa in this black-comic subversion
of feel-good holiday movies. The sentimental finale seems out of place,
but Bad Santa does unblinkingly delve into the commercialization
of Christmas, the limited job market for midgets and the pain endured
when one’s balls are kicked.

Beautiful Girls
(1996): Yes, one of its central concerns is about the way men idealize
ungraspable women (hence the title), but, more importantly, very few
movies capture the feeling of going home to small-town America during
the holidays as well as Ted Demme’s often underappreciated gem — from
dealing with family and old friends to the pleasures of revisiting
vintage childhood landmarks.

Related content

Local tidbit worthy of note: It features a
live bar-band performance by The Afghan Whigs.

Big Night(1995):
An orgiastic display of food that just might be the best movie ever
about merits of cooking as a form of art. It’s also incisive about the
perils of the restaurant business, the problems of brotherhood and the
ways food can bring people together (if only fleetingly). And, for the
purposes of this list, has there ever been a better movie to get once
juiced about a holiday meal?

A Christmas Tale
(2008): A fractured Parisian family reunites at Christmas when it
becomes apparent its matriarch (Catherine Deneuve) is suffering from a
potentially fatal disease. Talented French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin
uses that serious matter to jump off in a variety of directions, all of
which display his deft technical skills while never blunting his tale’s
richly layered emotional impact.

Gremlins
(1984): Ever-imaginative genre-juggler Joe Dante injects a smorgasbord
of anarchic merriment in this story of a Christmas gift gone awry. For
the era in which it was made, the special effects are remarkable — a
reminder that handmade puppets are always better than soulless
computer-generated images.

Metropolitan
(1990): Set during Christmas vacation among a pack of young,
upper-crust socialites in the late 1980s, Whit Stillman’s debut is a
window into a world that, more than 20 years after its release, still
seems fresh and unique, its depiction of class snobbery and adolescent
anxieties delivered with illumination and piercing wit.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(1993): Bored with his role as the Pumpkin King of Halloween, this year
Jack Skellington wants to team up with his buddies to give Santa Claus a
helping hand, leading to an unintended crisis that puts Christmas in
jeopardy. Producer Tim Burton often gets the most credit for this
stop-motion wonder, but director Henry Selick and screenwriter Caroline
Thompson should get just as much attention for their role in a
near-impossible feat: crafting a new, wholly singular fairy tale for the
holidays.

The Shop Around the Corner
(1940): “Never did I make a picture in which the atmosphere and the
characters were truer,” ace director Ernst Lubistch once said of his The Shop Around the Corner,
a uncommonly convincing romance that’s as graceful and beguiling as the
day it surfaced more than 70 years ago. The atmosphere is snow-dappled
Budapest during Christmastime; the characters are a pair of shop clerks
(Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) who become intertwined in a battle
of the sexes fraught with mix-ups and misunderstandings. Pure magic.